It certainly rains enough in the movie for you to think it's Ireland. The architecture of the houses looks familiar. There are An Post vans seen in the background. Yet, 'Wild Mountain Thyme' isn't even Irish. We shrug our shoulders and tell ourselves that we know better. Either way, the impact and the way we deal with it are just the same. It can be something like the current Home Secretary of the United Kingdom threatening another famine on Ireland or something a bit more benign like 'Wild Mountain Thyme'. If Irish people want to be insulted, it seems we never have to look too far. Worse still, how did anyone in Screen Ireland think that this was worth an investment of €280,000 and a tax credit worth somewhere in the region of anywhere between €500,000 to a million? You're not really sure how any of it exists, let alone how anyone involved in it believed in it. But, really, that's only scratching the surface at what makes this movie both awful and insulting in equal measure. Do you start with the accents? Yes, they're terrible. It's hard to know where to begin with 'Wild Mountain Thyme'. Stung by the plans of his father (Christopher Walken) to sell the family farm to his American nephew (Jon Hamm), Anthony is jolted into pursuing his dreams. The problem is, Anthony seems to have inherited a family curse, and remains oblivious to his beautiful admirer. Headstrong farmer Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt) has her heart set on winning the love of Anthony Reilly (Jamie Dornan), her neighbour. In other words, it’s certainly watchable, even pleasant – if you can get past whatever nonsense the characters are saying.If Irish people want to be insulted, it seems we never have to look too far for it. Dearbhla Molloy brings a wry grace (and an inoffensive accent) to Aoife, Rosemary’s wizened mother, the character who most successfully evokes the nostalgia and parochial familiarity the film strains to create. Stephen Goldblatt’s lush, tourism ad-esque cinematography on location in County Mayo is liable to make viewers pull a Rosemary and book a quick zip to the Emerald Isle as soon as this godforsaken pandemic is over. Shallowness aside, Wild Mountain Thyme has some merits. Instead, their final, minutes-long, romance-sparking row feels like watching two people argue over the infamous internet dress picture: circular and nonsensical to an outsider, impassioned but devoid of grounded feeling, ultimately stakes-less despite, in this case, a kiss in the rain (as promised on the film’s promotional poster). What, exactly, keeps them apart? Shanley’s script chalks Anthony’s reluctance to propose to Rosemary up to a family curse of hard-headedness but there’s something vital missing.Ībsent any friction other than unsubstantiated stubbornness (and, in a baffling and strange late reveal, some magical realist thinking), it’s difficult to feel invested in the couple’s skirting around what seems to be a very straightforward and inevitable conversation. That’s unfortunately missing here, as the film’s central tension – Anthony and Rosemary’s eventual union, it is not a spoiler when the resolution is so obviously baked into the premise – is undercut by a murky lack of conflict. That Wild Mountain Thyme makes little logistical or temporal sense is not unique or even imperiling for a romantic comedy, which can spin gold out of straw scaffolding with the gift of charm, chemistry or the basic intrigue of will-they, won’t-they hijinks. Anthony and Rosemary are allegedly in their mid-to-late 30s, yet there’s no indication of a romantic history or even life before the first scene (were they friends growing up? Teenage lovers? Did they live as neighbors for decades and just … not speak?) Rosemary has barely left her farm in western Ireland yet impulsively and seamlessly pulls off a two-day round trip to New York City to see a flirtatious Adam, and the most fazing event is the emotional resonance of the Swan Lake ballet. The story is ostensibly set in the present day, yet no character uses a cellphone or the internet. Shanley, who won a best screenplay Oscar for Moonstruck, and a Pulitzer and Tony for his 2004 play Doubt: A Parable, has penned a confusingly shallow script that brings the play’s emotional thinness and anachronisms into distracting, confounding focus. Many of the film’s issues probably derive from its source material, which marked Debra Messing’s Broadway debut (with her own appalling Irish accent) as Rosemary and opened to tepidly mixed reviews – the Hollywood Reporter praised the play’s “emotional generosity”, while the Irish Times deemed the work “mystifyingly awful”.
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